ABSTRACT
The public sector regulation within the context of the European integration process reveals the significance of public services and their delivery as instruments of policy from an economic, antitrust and industrial perspective. In the history of European integration and throughout the Treaties which bind together different legal, economic and political regimes, the public sector has emerged as the persistent nontariff barrier that creates the most prolific obstacles to the function of a genuinely competitive market across the Member States of the European Union. The regulation of public sector through an integrationist approach and the involvement of the private sector in delivering public services aims at the observance of fundamental principles of the EU, such as transparency and accountability and objectivity in order to establish the necessary conditions and the appropriate environment for competitive forces to rein the relevant markets. 1
The establishment of the common market, as the core objective envisaged by the Treaty of Rome as the treaty creating the European Economic Communities and reinforced by the Treaty of Maastricht as the treaty creating the European Union and all the amending Treaties leading to the Treaty of Lisbon on the Functioning of the European Union, is to be achieved through the progressive approximation of the economic policies of the Member States. The concept of the common market embraces the legal and economic dynamics of the European integration process, with clear political ambitions from its accomplishment, and presents the characteristics of a genuine integral market. 2 Such a market is a place where unobstructed mobility of factors of production is guaranteed and where a regime of effective and undistorted competition regulates its operation. These characteristics reflect on the four fundamental freedoms of a customs union (free movement of goods, persons, capital and services) and, to the extent that the customs union tends to become an economic and a monetary one, on the adoption of a common economic policy and the introduction of a single currency. The adherence by Member States to the above-mentioned fundamental principles of European economic integration will result in the removal of any restrictions or obstacles to interstate trade. The level of success of economic integration in the European Union would determine the level of success of
political integration among member states, which is the ultimate objective stipulated in the Treaties. It is maintained that a fifth freedom, the free movement of payments 3 , reflects a complementary dimension of the free mobility of capital as a production factor and plays an extremely important role in the process of integration of public markets, and in particular in financing public projects either through indirect or direct investment.
